The show revolves around people dueling with the card game Duel Monsters, a game that is rumoured to be based on an ancient Egyptian form of divination called the Shadow Game. Really, that's about it. Yugi gathers a collection of allies, mostly of the street-punk-with-a-heart-of-gold variety and runs around beating the rich and egotistical.

Yu-gi-oh seems like nothing more than just another shameless marketing ploy aimed at middle-class youth. Well, maybe I don't give Bandai enough credit. They've taken merchandising to a whole new level with this one...

It used to be, if a tv show or movie was successful, the production company would flood toy store shelves with merchandise based on the production. But now, it seems that the process has been reversed. Yu-gi-oh is a show about a trading card game along the lines of Pokemon or Magic the Gathering --imagine that. The advantage now is that, marketing people for lack of a better term, no longer need to think of fun and appealing merchanise that tie into the production, the show producer has already taken care of that.

The entire cartoon show has the marketing processes, and the planned merchandise in mind. So, in effect, the show is just a marketing device, sort of a preparation for the release of the trading card game.

So what's the flaw in this if there is one? Well from the producer's point of view, this merely replaced one obstacle with another. Now instead of marketng having to devise sellable merchandise that ties into the show, the show producers are stuck with the dilemma of devising a sellable plot that will also glamorize planned merchandise.

So the real advantage is just that it's a lot easier to sell a crappy cartoon to little kids than dumb toys to their parents. Kids will watch anything animated and broadcasted after nap time.

Ikura notes that transformers toys may have been the first example of this type of marketing campaign, but since the actual toys were designed before the cartoon was aired perhaps the cartoon only spawned from the success of the toys as a way to raise extra revenue and not so much to prepare the market for the toys.

Before there was the mass media marketing ploy that is the TV dub of Yu-Gi-Oh! (which, incidentally, only shows the Duel Monsters-centered second season onward of the anime series), there was the original manga by Kazuki Takahashi.

Yu-Gi-Oh! tells the story of Yugi Mutoh (or Moto, in the U.S.), a slightly geeky high school student living in Domino City. He gets picked on a lot, even by his two friends Katsuya Jounouchi (Joey Wheeler in the U.S. version) and Hiroto Honda (Tristan Taylor), who are quite the troublemakers in the early volumes of the manga (chasing girls and getting into fights, among other things). Probably his only real friend at first is his classmate Anzu Mazaki (Tea Gardner), the token cute and sympathetic girl. All that changes, however, when Yugi manages to assemble the mysterious Millenium Puzzle, a gift from his grandfather Suguroku Mutoh (Solomon Moto, or just "Grandpa"). He is "gifted" with another self, a stronger, more confident identity who wields the power of the "Shadow Games", using it to dispense harsh justice to the people who threaten Yugi, or his friends and classmates.

As many anime fans may note, the early episodes of the manga are significantly darker than the anime series (even in comparison to the original Japanese). In the first volume alone, Yugi challenges a corrupt hall monitor, a conniving "reality TV" director, an escaped murderer, a karaoke-loving bully, and others to Shadow Games (ranging from dice-rolling, to a high stakes version of "The Quiet Game", to my personal favorite, a game of air hockey on a hot grill with a puck made from ice that has a tube of nitroglycerine stuck in it), where the contestants risk losing their lives or their minds (Yugi frequently inflicts a "Penalty Game" illusion, such as amplifying the karaoke-obsessed bully's heartbeat to deafening levels, or making the world look like one big censor mosaic to the evil director). Duel Monsters (originally called "Magic and Wizards") isn't even mentioned until volume 2 of the manga series. As you can probably tell, I find the manga to be a vast improvement over the stateside release of the anime (I'll admit I'm biased, though, since the manga is uncut and I haven't seen the Japanese version of the anime).